Welcome to episode 195, I had planned to cover a different subject (The dangers of automation - let me know your thoughts on that!) this week but then I got an excellent voicemail question from Giles about the differences between following and connecting and decided to cover that subject in more detail.

But before that……

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Find the Right Words to Land the Right Job More on this in next weeks episode! The Most Popular Jobs and Companies for College Graduates The top job is also the highest pay! ($95k) Insight Global - a fast growing IT recruitment business Why I changed my LinkedIn profile from Andrea to Andrew She was taken more seriously and less patronised when a man! The algorithm started suggesting connections to higher level men at well-recognised companies. Fascinating experiment …..could be worth a try!

LinkedIn Updates

Have you noticed the new font? Summaries and headlines may need to be adjusted. New changes to groups may be having some positive impact on groups One manager reports a 10x increase in engagement Unfortunately the changes seemed to have messed up all other notifications! You can now see your own activity in one click, rather than having to go to your profile

LinkedIn are clearing ‘moving the furniture’ on desktop at the moment, so many things are not working - especially @mentions and notifications. I also found that only half the comments on one of my posts were showing when I checked on mobile. Suggest you keep an eye on mobile at the moment until things settle down.

Connecting and Following

As I mentioned, this subject was instigated by a question I received from Giles;

Definition: Following someone means that you could see their content and activity in your feed (articles, posts, shares, likes and comments). You can follow anyone on LinkedIn provided their setting allow this.

You can follow up to 5000 people who are not your connections. To follow someone simply click on the 3 dot ‘More’ menu at the top of their profile or look for the Follow button on the Activity section of their profile.

Connecting

A connection is a follower and someone you follow by default. You can unfollow a connection at anytime from the ‘More’ menu. You are allowed up to 30,000 connections.

The difference with a connection is that, as well as their activity you are able to see and filter their connections (dependant on their setting), send messages and see their full contact info including their primary email address.

Now to Giles question

Firstly let me address the question of blocking.

This is the only way you can prevent him from following you He will not be alerted to being blocked He will then not be able to find you on LinkedIn, or vice versa

The bigger question is whether a competitor following you is a problem or not?

What harm can come from him seeing your activity - assuming you are not giving away commercially sensitive information? Following you may make him realise he is way behind and may, in some way intimidate him. A greater threat would come if he started commenting and engaging with your posts

This brings up a wider point;

The ethics of competition on LinkedIn;

Is it ethical to provide advice and demonstrate your knowledge on a competitors post? Should you ever ask for a competitors view via an @mention?

When to follow and NOT connect

A complete stranger whose content you find interesting A competitor A prospect or intermediary who you wish to engage with

Obviously 1 and 3 may be pre-cursors to connecting.

Following has been around on LinkedIn for years but still most people just connect, it’s beginning to be understood better but we still have a way to go. When I talk with people who are more familiar with other social networks, I explain the mechanics of LinkedIn as being like a blend of Twitter, where you follow and Facebook where you connect (friend). On LinkedIn you can do either!

This weeks question is also about following and comes from Nigel Willis

Nigels first question refers to following Influencers such as Bill gates. Influencers have become known for posting some decent content but never engaging with comments, this somewhat flies in the face of the point of content in my opinion! I’m not surprised you want to unfollow Bill and as far as I know it will not cause you any issues with the algorithm. In terms of the second question. You can’t specify that you wish to see a certain type of content from someone that you are following but you can select to follow topics. Unfortunately LinkedIn do not allow us to see a list of Topics, we have to wait for them to suggest them although searching for content can often trigger the algorithm to suggest a Topic relevant to that search. You can also unfollow people to clean up your feed You can also search for content and follow people who write about subjects that interest you.

Welcome to episode 194, this week I have a chat with my friend and fellow LinkedIn trainer/consultant Sandra Long about personal branding.

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn Announce some changes to groups

I have mentioned previously that I’m aware that LinkedIn are currently working on a project to improve groups and this week they sent out a communication advising of several changes that will happen soon. I think most people have been sent it but in case you didn’t see it;

My thoughts; Accessing groups from the homepage is a welcome move but lets be clear, this is just a roll back to how it used to be! Including group conversations in the feed is also nothing new. This one concerns me in that most activity in groups is useless broadcasting as well as spam so this could actually be a negative thing for members homepage feeds! Posting videos is great news. No surprise either as it has been a success on the home page and the ability to @mention (assuming it works!) is a positive step. Retirement of the iOS Groups app. I’m not sure how this will improve the use of groups….taking away an app is not exactly moving forward! You have always been able to access groups from the main app anyway (Android users have always had to do it that way) Maybe LinkedIn felt it was necessary to release this information now in light of the recent Facebook summit where groups were mentioned but I have to say, these changes are somewhat underwhelming! I’m sure this is really just the start of the groups design. I’m disappointed because I felt they needed to scrap groups altogether and start again from scratch. Getting members back engaging in groups is going to be very hard because most members have just written them off. LinkedIn quote: “Additional notifications, groups posts in feed, video posts, @mentions and replies to comments have been announced because those are the items for which we have a decent sense of the timeline. But it is definitely not an exhaustive list of the work we're doing to improve Groups” Let’s hope that the next announcements are more exciting!

Personal Branding

This week I had a chat with LinkedIn expert Sandra Long. Personal branding was one of my predictions for 2018 covered in episode 192 and a subject I believe to be very important to all of us. I even covered it briefly in the first ever episode of LinkedInformed when I introduced ‘Personal Branding for Brits’ author Jennifer Holloway

Key takeaways

Tom Peters article The Brand Called You which is still just as relevant today as when it was written in 1997! Social media really allows us to craft an image that we want to portray. This has many advantages but also creates an authenticity challenge. Social media has blended our social and professional lives. This creates a question as to how ‘open’ we want to be with business contacts about our personal lives. 40% of people don’t know how to describe what they do…and those are just the hard facts, never mind describing your character! The best way to describe what you do is to be very specific - broad, ‘jack of all trades’ profiles rarely work for you. In terms of character - what makes you unique? You can display this information in a variety of different sections of your LinkedIn profile. It can help to define a ‘persona’ when writing your LinkedIn summary - Sandra’s book gives plenty of persona examples and has a list of questions that can help define your persona. This also impacts corporate brands as many organisations are now realising that they are in reality, a collective of many personal brands and this can be a very powerful. It is however really important to be authentic to your own brand and this needs to align, for the most part with the corporate brand you are representing. Your activity on LinkedIn should also be in line with your brand. If your brand is genuine then this should not be difficult! It’s often a good test on whether your brand image is right. Posting should never be self-promotional. Thought leadership, being helpful and contributing to the LinkedIn community by developing conversations is the best way to ‘stay on brand’ - your profile should clearly explain what you do. Final word from Sandra: Take the time to really think through who you are and your ‘brand elements’ before you start to write your profile

Welcome to episode 193 and a very happy and prosperous new year to you all. I trust everyone had a fantastic break over Christmas.

Towards the end of last year I conducted a survey of LinkedIn users to see how behaviour had changed on LinkedIn. I had a sense that the results would be interesting……and I wasn’t disappointed!

In this episode I will go through the results with you but before that….

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedOut: The 7 Stages of Grieving a Breakup LinkedOut Update: what to do if your account is restricted?

New LinkedIn Feature

Invitation Sorting You can now sort your received invitations. This is probably only going to be useful for people that get a lot of invites or get behind with dealing with them but it’s good to see an improvement anyway.

I think an additional catergory of “customized with a message” would also be helpful as, when I do have a lot to go through, I always prefer to read those with messages first.

Magnet Posts

It would appear that the ‘magnet’ post feature has been improved in that you no no longer need to have any of the skills you specify in your post - as previously covered in episode 189, this makes much more sense! Thanks to Jillian for the heads up on this

I still don’t have the feature but if you do and have been using it, I would love to hear how well it has worked for you.

Interesting Post

Thanks to Carl for sending this one in.

This is actually pretty easy to do yourself, but only if you have access to a Sales Navigator or Recruiter account. For some reason the url’s on those interfaces ignore the customised version and show the original source url with your number in it

The 2017 LinkedIn User Survey Results

We had 780 responses in total, thank you to everyone who took the time to complete the questions. One of the questions asked for the date you signed up to LinkedIn…one person apparently signed up in the year 1800! This individual apparently signs into their account on a weekly basis but has only managed to amass 8 connections in all that time - in addition they have 0 followers so presumably all 8 connections have chosen to unfollow them!! Fortunately this was the only spoof entry we received.

The average number of connections was 2178 The average number of followers was 2748

We had five people who had reached the maximum 30,000 connections.

The highest number of followers was 205,000 (11,658 were connections) and equally impressive was someone who had 165,231 followers including only 1903 connections!